The Characters of Mass Effect 2

Spoilers for Mass Effect 2.

I first finished the Mass Effect trilogy in 2013. I only chose to revisit it via the 2021 Legendary Edition of the game because it had the longest estimated completion time on my list of media I mean to consume at about 107 hours long. I remembered playing Mass Effect 1 a lot when I first got my Xbox 360 in high school. I remembered loving the story of Mass Effect 2 when I finally got around to playing it. And I remember playing Mass Effect 3 a few months after it came out and almost rushing through it, retaining very little.

While the Legendary Edition of the Mass Effect Trilogy was revamped for the previous generation of consoles, I’m more grateful for the faster load times than any other quality of life changes made. On the PS5 I’ve had no issues with functionality, save clipping into bits of cover at times using the Vanguard’s charge ability in ME2. I’m not here to tell you the Mass Effect trilogy is worth experiencing or revisiting. There are countless reviews and essays that are meant to do exactly that. Mass Effect 2 currently sits at a Metascore of 96 on Metacritic. It was more or less universally praised upon release. A lot of people enjoy it, and you probably will too.

I wanted to talk about the squad members of Mass Effect 2. They are considered by and large to be very-well written. They idle around your ship in between missions, and the game encourages you to stop by their respective quarters and talk with them. As the story progresses, the characters confide in you, their commander, some mission they want to detour to accomplish for the sake of personal closure. I enjoyed this part of the game more than any other part of ME2. There are books to be written about the games’ world building, or else about the development cycles of the trilogy with all the outrages of the time included. Not this time, I just want to briefly spotlight each of the characters of Mass Effect 2 and my thoughts on their respective personal story arcs.

Jacob Taylor

The first companion you get is a former Alliance soldier employed by the human-supremacist space corporation Cerberus. He’s familiar with your work, but has reservations about you because he doesn’t know you personally. He has reservations regarding Cerberus as well, given their underhanded or clandestine way of doing things. During his loyalty mission, you receive information on his father’s crashed ship on an uncharted planet. Jacob’s father has been missing for years, and I thought it was unlikely there would be survivors. There were. Including Jacob’s father. The ship officers kept the prepackaged food for themselves, and forced the rest of the crew to consume local flora that had degenerative neurological effects. Jacob’s father eventually became the only one cognizant, practically enslaving the rest of the crew and using the women onboard at his leisure. Our party’s arrival discovers this and puts an end to it. Jacob is understandably furious that the father he admired became this inhuman consolidation of wants and power and decides his old man should be put down. I chose to prevent Jacob from shooting his father. I agreed with him on some level, but I didn’t want to see this good man become a patricide. Jacob trusts you after this, comforted not by words but by the fact you have his back and will make the right calls for the crew.

Miranda Lawson

Miranda Lawson is a highly modified Cerberus Agent whose entire training was overseen by Cerberus Darth Sidious-equivalent, The Illusive Man (voiced by Martin Sheen). Miranda’s loyalty to Cerberus is in tact at the beginning, and she still takes her role as the company’s representative throughout the story. Miranda conveys a distinct professionalism that spills over into coldness, even more so than my interactions with Jacob or Garrus (How many times you gonna calibrate that damn gun, man?). Her loyalty mission consists of relocating her little sister. Her sister is a grown woman now, but as a baby Miranda rescued the child from her father and sent her off someplace safe to live a normal life. Both women are modified clones of their father by doubling his own X chromosome. Miranda’s sister was meant to modified and trained in the same ways she was. Miranda can’t bear to let that happen. We help Miranda and her contacts intercept the mercenaries going to abduct her sister. Afterwards, we encourage Miranda to go meet her sister for the first time in person. What Miranda gets from the interactions with the player is a sense of humanity, of empathy for herself, and for others. Miranda hoped Cerberus would protect her from her father, but they also worked to mold her into something more. By the end she seems to gain a better sense of self outside of her acknowledgement of her abilities.

Kasumi Goto

Kasumi I was unfamiliar with at first. She’s a little more upbeat than her appearance would suggest, a murderous shadow-stepping assassin who’s useful on the squad. She was initially a DLC character, so on my first playthrough a decade ago I never had her on my team. Kasumi’s loyalty mission involves recovering a grey box (like a black box but for modified people) that belonged to her own partner. The mission itself is a treat, presented as more James Bond than Sci-Fi shoot out. At the end of her mission, you recover the grey box, and it turns out that her old partner was also her lover. He leaves her a message, saying that dangerous information is encoded in the grey box and that she has to let go of him and destroy it. At this point Kasumi started showing real emotion. The grey box was all she had left of him. I encouraged her to honor his wishes. It would be nice to go back, to see the past through his eyes and remember him, but its better to mourn and to let go. I felt as though letting her keep the box would have undone her more over time. Overall, a much more emotional story than I was anticipating from this DLC character.

Zaeed Massani

Zaeed is a bit of a hardheaded jerk. He’s a mercenary, a DLC character, and also one unfamiliar to me. His inclusion on this playthrough was an interesting new addition for me. He’s very capable in combat, even more so than Kasumi in some ways, but he ‘s bitter, abrasive. We find the reason for this is because he started the Blue Suns mercenary group years ago, only to have his face horribly scarred and be usurped by his lieutenant. Zaeed’s loyalty mission involved chasing down said traitor, which we did at the expense of people we might have otherwise rescued. I was thinking mechanically at the time, as a player rather than a participant. If we went back to save the people in trouble during our pursuit of the traitor, the traitor might have gotten away and I wouldn’t have gotten Zaeed’s Loyalty. We left them behind, Zaeed put the man down, and we left. Zaeed was loyal to me after that. A strange thing happened though. On the suicide mission at the end of the game, I set Zaeed to defend a hall while we went around. By the time I was able to let Zaeed in with the rest of the group, his wounds were too grievous. He was the only crew member I lost during the entire playthrough. He lived in blood, he died in blood, and I didn’t change that.

Garrus Vakarian

Garrus is one of two returning companions from ME1. He’s a former CSEC agent turned idealist assassin. In the time since the player last saw Garrus, he has been actively hunting down gang members in the most dangerous parts of space. You find him on Omega, and he’s not near so idealistic as last time. You encounter him mid-firefight as the gangs are teaming up to take him down. You manage to get Garrus out, but an explosion scars his face and armor. Garrus hadn’t been working alone the whole time. He had a team, and one of those teammates betrayed them to the gangs on Omega, resulting in all but Garrus and his own loyalty mission traitor being killed. You hear tell of the traitor being spotted on the Citadel and help Garrus hunt him down. In retrospect, perhaps Zaeed’s loyalty quest was too similar to Garrus’. And the endings were much the same. I posed as a decoy to meet the traitor, Garrus lined up a shot from across the plaza, I got out of the way. I wanted Garrus’ loyalty, and I helped him to facilitate that. I did not feel any sort of moral ambiguity about it however. This was the man responsible for killing Garrus’ entire squad- it wasn’t like we had to gun our way through a spaceship to reach the man he wanted. I hoped that the death of the traitor helped put his mind at ease, and by the end it truly seemed to. Garrus too abandons his fixation with the past to focus on the current threat.

Grunt

Grunt is a Krogan genetically designed and grown in a tube to be the perfect warrior. The Krogan as a species have had trouble reproducing since the genophage, a genocidal virus that kills most Krogan children in infancy. This was part of a war 300+ years ago, yet the repercussions are still being felt at the time the game takes place. The Salarians created the virus, and the Turians deployed it, making the few Krogan left in the universe mistrustful of these species. Grunt agrees to follow you not for your charisma, but for your strength. He wishes to match his strength against strong opponents, as is the Krogan instinct. This instinct drives you both to his own loyalty mission, where he needs to undergo a Krogan rite of manhood to be accepted into a clan and be seen as a proper adult and warrior. The rite itself is an arena fight, culminating in a fight with an ME sandworm-equivalent, a thresher maw. Through undergoing the rite and finding acceptance in a clan, Grunt is able to center himself once more. I loved the interactions between grunt and the other Krogan on their home planet. Krogan’s value strength. Their spitting dismissals of Grunt as a test-tube baby are almost immediately washed away by his ability in combat. Grunt finds that he is what he always knew he was, and that acceptance brings him peace.

Jack

Jack is a peculiar case. Recruited from the prison where Cerberus was keeping her, you go to collect her only to have to chase her down, convince her you’re not the bad kind of Cerberus employee, and bring her back to the ship. I wonder if Eleven from stranger things was inspired by her character at all. Jack is an incredibly strong biotic (ME psychics essentially) who was raised in confinement by Cerberus to hone as a weapon and study for further human advancement. You give her Cerberus files on the place Jack grew up as a sign of good faith. Their methods of study were invasive, cruel, and painful. When Jack finds the location of the place where she was kept and tortured, she asks to detour so that she can blow the place sky high. This is Jack’s loyalty mission. You explore the abandoned facility only to find it not so abandoned. Another biotic child all grown up has returned and is trying to revive the project, to make his life seem a little less pointless, his pain a little more bearable. This infuriates Jack, who went to kill the man until I intervened. The man had endured the same tortures as Jack, yet wasn’t able to bear it like she had. I felt that maybe I would have been something more like him than Jack had that been my childhood. Still, in destroying the facility Jack is able to let go of most of the pain that place caused her, and if there’s another survivor who can make something more of their life, to find inner peace, all the better.

Mordin Solus

Mordin Solus is a Salarian. Their metabolism is incredibly fast, they live to a maximum age of about 50, and are some of the fastest thinkers in the galaxy. Mordin is recruited from his work in a slum clinic treating people affected by a viral outbreak. Mordin has experience not only in medicine and technology, but also worked in Salarian special forces, and is not hesitant to shoot down a threat. Mordin can come off as standoffish, but that may just be his fast-talking, faster-thinking nature. His loyalty mission involves rescuing an old colleague of Mordin’s that helped him work on a cure for the genophage, the previously mentioned genocide-the-Krogans plague. At first we believe he is being held by the Krogan clan he is with, only to find out he is actively working on a cure out of guilt. Mordin has also expressed a similar guilt, but a resolution that they did the right thing in not reversing the plague. I wouldn’t let Mordin shoot his old colleage, instead we had him clear off. I did encourage him to save the data though. I don’t think the genophage was the best solution, and I hope there’s a way to deploy the cure in ME3. If there is, it is because Mordin Solus felt some degree of empathy and only needed some convincing to bring us closer to a more lively galaxy.

Samara

Samara is an Asari Justicar. They are like the secret police for the Asari people, given absolute judgement on the cases they pursue. Samara came into my game late, a powerful biotic, but older, more mature and centered than most of the rest of the crew. Samara’s loyalty mission involves her own pet project. When she was young, Samara had numerous daughters. She learned later in life that she has a disease that she passed to her three daughters. If they are intimate with anyone, they will kill that person. Samara believes she put these children, these Ardat-Yakshi, out of their misery. Giving her daughter Morinth the option to live a hermetic life or else be killed, Morinth ran. Samara has tracked her to the Omega, and you operate as bait so that Samara can follow you and Morinth back to Morinth’s apartment and confront her. The two powerful biotics face off, and you have to choose who assist. I assisted Samara. While emotionally conflicted over the situation, Morinth was about to literally bang me to death, which, while being a great way to go out, is not something I currently desire. Samara seems to have little trouble accepting what she’s done. It was, in her eyes at least, justice.

Morinth

Morinth is Samara’s aforementioned daughter. I almost described her as the Ardat-Notinthisreview, as I kept Samara and never had Morinth join my team to replace her. Still, I was given pause. To actively pursue intimacy when you have a condition that makes intimate contact fatal to your partner is not acceptable. Yet her alternative is execution or to be locked away. I felt for Morinth. Her life is over in many different ways at once. Only once her own mother catches up to her does it become final.

Tali’Zorah vas Neema

Tali is the other returning crew membrer from ME1, a Quarian recently returned from her pilgrimage with unmatched technical skill. Tali joins your crew after the loss of her own expedition to the impending threat of the collectors. Her loyalty mission begins when she receives a message from her own government saying she is being tried for treason. You return with Tali to the Quarian flotilla to find out that geth (robots made by the quarians who rebelled and almost wiped them out centuries ago) were active in the materials Tali returned to the flotilla, and that the ship that was working with the materials has been taken over by the geth. No one can get close, so we volunteer to go set it to rights. Tali is sure she sent nothing actively dangerous back to the flotilla. She loves her people and would never betray or deliberately compromise them. As we work our way through the occupied ship, we find Tali’s father’s body. We find that he was trying to find a way to rebuild and reprogram the geth to be servants as they were originally intended. Not only did he fail, but he put all of his people in jeopardy through his thoughtless actions. I chose not to implicate Tali’s father when we were put in front of the council once more. The accidental treachery was more of a deliberate stupidity, and Tali did not need her father’s name ruined on top of having to mourn his death. To disclose his mistake would have helped no one. After this, Tali changes her ship name from vas Neema to vas Normandy, the name of your own ship. I found her loyalty mission to be more personal than many of the others. The previous games’ experience with Tali showed me the kind of person she is, and she didn’t deserve the accusations being levied at her.

Thane Krios

Thane Krios is a Drell and a master assassin. He is also dying of a disease. He has months left to live, and is starting on settling his accounts when you finally recruit him. His loyalty mission relates to this. His son, whom he abandoned after the death of his mother to keep him away from his father’s line of work, has somehow discovered his father’s work. The son appears at the Citadel and takes on a job to kill a local crime boss. You and thane rush to stop him, interrupting the assassination and arresting Thane’s son before he can do any serious damage. Thane and his son get to talk, finally. Thane explains his reasoning, and while not all bridges are mended, a few boards are tossed up for the crossing and the father and son keep in contact after the mission concludes. What I like about Thane, as well as Samara’s missions, are that they are both older people resolved in what they have to do. They don’t need your help in deciding what is right, they just need your help doing it. Thane as a doomed assassin set on finding peace is so much his own person, I have trouble deciding what he was like before the diagnosis.

Legion

Legion is the final available companion in ME2 and is, strangely, a geth. The geth seem to be enemies of all organic life, particularly the quarians. Unlike most geth, Legion is unique, loaded with more programs that let him verbally communicate with organics. He is not hostile, and we have the choice to have him join us or send him off to Cerberus. So Legion sticks around. His loyalty mission provides more insight into the way the geth operate. The geth do not hate organic life, but are indifferent to it. It is a virus made by geth “heretics” that reprograms the geth to fight for the impending world-ending force known as the Reapers. You set out with Legion to destroy this virus. We successfully did so, and it left me coming away with a different perspective on the machines I spent the better part of the last game fighting. They’re not toasters, they’re sentient life, and yet they are exposed to certain vulnerabilities and indifferences mostly unique to mechanical life.